In both commercial and military applications, the possibility of another entity reverse engineering critical components is a danger to be avoided if possible. In commercial applications, businesses risk losing market share and money if another company is able to reverse engineer critical components. In military applications, governments risk losing battlefield advantages and soldiers' lives if critical system components are reverse engineered.
Recent advances in the technology for securing critical components include enclosing such components in anti-tamper containers (e.g., boxes, tubing, or other enclosures). These containers include sensors and monitoring devices that detect unauthorized attempts to open or circumvent the containers. If such an unauthorized attempt is detected, the monitoring devices activate appropriate responses to protect the components, such as erasing critical data and/or physically destroying the components. However, these anti-tamper containers do not provide a perfect solution, and they typically only delay the reverse engineering attempts made. Given enough time and opportunity, the security containers can be compromised, and the components and data reverse engineered. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a system and method for improving the anti-tamper protection provided by existing security containers. As described in detail below, the present invention provides a system and method, which increases the protection of critical components housed in networked security containers.